Author: d.j.blackmore-squires

Aristophanes at Chickenshed was an international collaboration between the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT), University College London (UCL), the University of Parma, Chickenshed Theatre and Teatro delle Albe. It aimed to explore the impacts performing ancient Greek comedy can have on young people through a methodology combining performance pedagogy and practice-as-research. The first stage was a five-day workshop on Aristophanes’ Peace held from the 28th of October to the 1st of November 2024 at Chickenshed Theatre in London, co-organised by Francesca Bortoletti (Parma), Giovanna Di Martino (UCL), Lucy Ruddiman (Bristol), and Francesca Venturi (Albe / Ravenna Teatro). This workshop was directed by Marco Marinelli (co-founder and co-artistic director of Ravenna Teatro and co-artistic director of Vicenza’s Teatro Olimpico), with the assistance of dramaturg Giovanna Di Martino (UCL), who also produced a new translation of the play. It brought together students from the universities involved and students from Chickenshed’s education programmes, culminating in two performances of a new version of Peace which had been devised over the course of the five days. The second stage of this project was an interdisciplinary roundtable held between the departments of Theatre and Classics at the University of Bristol on the 11th of November 2024, as part of the Theatre at Bristol Seminars (TaBS), which discussed and reflected on the workshop.

 

The aim for this project was to bring different groups of people with various kinds of knowledge together to explore ancient comedy through performance as a form of pedagogy and practice as research. The goal was not to re-create or re-discover meanings that Peace may have had in the ancient world, but to participate in the creation of new knowledge around the play, its myth-story, and theatre practices. One student reflected, ‘I loved creating for an Ancient Greek show – as I had very little knowledge of shows from that period beforehand. This experience has inspired me to be more confident in trying a new approach in theatre.’ Another valuable aspect of this process was the community created during the workshop. There were challenges to this: we had different groups of people (some of whom were already used to working together in a particular way, and some of whom had never worked together before), we were combining different methods of making theatre, we were exploring a play that almost all participants were unfamiliar with, and we were doing it all across a language barrier. Nevertheless, the students reported that they had felt a strong sense of community in this process. One student commented that, ‘I didn’t expect to build such a strong connection within such a short period of time.’ Another student was pleased to find that, ‘even though we spoke different languages we still worked so well together and could communicate through our passion for performing, rather than our language differences.’ That we were able to bring this group together into a community to create our own Aristophanes was feature of the process which we felt spoke strongly in the favour of performance pedagogy as a way of exploring ancient drama.

The roundtable held at the University of Bristol was well attended by students and staff from a variety of different departments and facilitated an interesting interdisciplinary conversation. The panellists were: Katja Krebs (Theatre), Paul Martin (Classics), Jess McCormack (Theatre), Naomi Scott (Classics), Lucy Ruddiman (Theatre) and Giovanna Di Martino (Greek and Latin, UCL). The event began with Giovanna Di Martino and Lucy Ruddiman providing a summary of the workshop and showing some video clips from the performance. This was followed by testimonials from the Bristol undergraduate students, Lily Walker and Leonardo Morgan-Russell, who had participated in the workshop. There was then a panel discussion which covered a range of topics including: questioning the role of text as a source of authority in performance, the capacity of comic performance to incorporate improvisation and mistakes (in both the ancient and modern worlds), and the power of chorus in performance. We hope this project may pave the way for similar interdisciplinary collaborations in the future. We would like to thank the IGRCT and TaBS for their funding and support of this project.